1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally concerns a cabinet for the control of power for electric machines, the cabinet being situated between a programmable controller and the electric machines or actuating devices. It contains the switchgear required for supplying power to the latter or, in exceptional cases, relay control signals, according to the instructions received from the controller.
This invention is more particularly applicable to machining operations, assembling machines and the handling operations between them, as well as the field of automated machine assembly for mass production.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The automatic systems currently used in these fields are sequential types without programmers. Besides the difficulty of initial construction, adding operations or changing the order of operations is rather difficult. The resulting modifications of the wiring and the power controller cabinets are often extensive and costly. It is not surprising that this approach leads to lengthy work stoppages.
Automated systems with programmers have been used but very rarely with machine tools. These systems resulted in cabinets as complex as those of sequential systems with the cabinets requiring numerous cables between the machines and the programmer and between the programmer and the cabinet. Moreover, there was no improvement in out of service time.